An annual plant does its whole thing in one growing season. It grows from seed, attains its full size, flowers, & produces seed in one year or less, then dies.

Annuals can be grown in beds, borders, carpet beddings, containers, window boxes, & cutting gardens. Several annuals can be dried for everlasting flowers, fragrance, edible flowers, children's gardens, & rock gardens. Annuals bring wonderful color, form, texture, & fragrance to the garden. They fill the gaps in perennial gardens.

Type: annual
Flowers: pink, purple, red, white, yellow, orange.

2004 was my first time growing Snapdragons. In the very early spring I bought some that were flowering so pretty & had them in the house to cheer me up. I put them outdoors; cut them back to within 5 or 6 nodes from the ground & waited. I've been well rewarded. And I can't understand why I've never grown them before. They were so colorful & care free. I'm hoping they will self-seed & come back next year.

I've learned that a wide range of snapdragons are available. The tall types 30 - 36" tall, Medium 1' - 2' tall, Small bedding type 6 - 15", Rock garden hybrids 3 - 6" tall. They say the dwarfs are good in window boxes.

Snapdragons like slightly acid soil & do not do well in clay soil. They require full sun & moist soil. Propagate by seed or by cuttings which root readily. I'll have to try it. Pre-chilled seeds germinate the best so I think I'll leave them on the ground. They say to pinch back seedlings but the dwarf ones do not need to be pinched.

Marigold: The name is reference to the Virgin Mary & the precious metal “gold”. The plant originated in India where the flowers decorate shrines & gurus & worshippers wear marigold garlands. The flowers are offerings at temples to ensure safe travel. Cradles of the children are decorated with marigold & jasmine during the child’s naming ceremony.

Marigolds are native to Mexico and South America.

They originally came to America from Argentina. The earliest use of Marigolds was by the Aztecs. They named their native flower cempoalxochit.

In the 1500’s, it’s suspected that marigold seeds were taken from the Aztecs and brought to Spain by Spanish explorers. The flowers were cultivated and grown in monastery gardens in Spain. Then taken to France and Northern Africa.

Taller Marigolds naturalized in North Africa. Later during an 1535 African expedition to Tunis, tall, naturalized marigolds were mistaken for native wild flowers. The seed was collected, and again taken to Spain, discovering that indeed it was marigolds. They were later called Flos Africanus due to its origin. These flowers were well known by this name well into the 1700’s.

The saga of the long sought after white marigold is an interesting historical tale. It’s of special interest to me as I was briefly acquainted with the Iowa woman Alice Vonk who won the $10,000.00 prize for developing the seed. I frequently drive by her tiny hometown just 20 miles away. There’s a big billboard with the town name Sully, IA, the years of sport championships for the local high school teams, & the claim to fame: “Home of Alice Vonk / Developer of the world’s first white marigold”. It’s so farmland USA. I love it.

“Indeed, marigolds were the focus of David Burpee's longest experimental project and greatest promotional exploit. In 1954, he offered a $10,000 prize to the first gardener who could provide seeds for a white marigold -- something that simply didn't seem to exist. A pale lemon color was the closest his professional breeders had come. During the next two decades, more than 80,000 customers sent in seeds for testing. Some of them won $100 prizes for good tries, but the winner would have to produce a flower 2 1/2 inches wide and as white as Burpee's "Snowstorm" Petunia.

By 1975, Burpee's breeders had come closer than any of the submissions received with a variety called the "Snowbird", the whitest marigold developed to that day. At that point, Burpee and a panel of six horticultural professors reviewed the six top submissions and awarded the $10,000 to Alice Vonk, the widow of an Iowa farmer. Taking into account the contest costs, the prizes, and the development of the "Snowbird", that marigold was the world's costliest flower, but David Burpee considered the money well spent. Never had so many gardens in America been planted with marigolds.”

“All his life, David Burpee, 82, has been devoted to the task of making a better marigold. As chief of the W. Atlee Burpee mail-order seed company from 1915 to 1970, Burpee found ways to invent new varieties large and small, but his main quest was for a pure white marigold, one that could be cross-pollinated with existing yellow, orange, and rust varieties to create a rainbow of new colors. In 1954, Burpee made a public offer of $10,000 for seeds that would produce a white blossom at least 2½ in. across. Amateur gardeners sent in thousands of entries, and the Burpee Co. spent $250,000 in testing them, in vain.

Then, last year, Alice Vonk, now 67, a widowed mother of eight from Sully, Iowa, sent in some seeds to Burpee's farm in California. The first crop of marigolds was not quite white, but its seeds were planted this year, yielding at last the winner. Mrs. Vonk, who picked up her check last week at Burpee's home in Doylestown, Pa., did it all without any highfalutin horticultural techniques. Every summer for the past 20 years, she simply picked out the flowers that came closest to the ideal and saved their seeds for replanting: "I put red strings on the flowers that looked good and green ones on those that looked pretty good." Adds Marigold Maven Burpee: "This wasn't just luck, it was persistence. She just did the right thing."

Isn’t this a fun story? I’ve long loved marigolds but knowing Alice even so briefly just before her death cultivated a great appreciation within me for marigolds. And her perseverance was extraordinary. Alice exemplifies what it takes to succeed. “Many of life’s failures are men who give up not realizing how close to success they may be”. (Thomas Edison)

Years ago I always planted marigolds along my veggie gardens; big ones, little ones, medium size ones, solid orange ones, bright yellow ones, multicolored ones, pompom shaped leaves, daisy shaped leaves. My grandma Vi said they’re suppose to keep away some kinds of unwanted bugs & maybe even rabbits. They don’t smell very good but they are great color in the late summer garden. When other plants are winding down during heat & drought, marigolds gloriously explode becoming the biggest show off around. When the going gets tough the marigolds get growing. They prolifically self-sow themselves in undisturbed ground where they will do their own thing with little to no tending. Those folks who want very low maintenance plants want marigolds. I stick marigolds in spaces & places to fill the gaps accentuating perennial plants & setting the stage for an autumn extravaganza mingled with mums & other fun fall things.

Grows well in hot, dry areas, rock gardens, as an edging plant, & interplanted with bulbs. Great for container gardens, too. When we lived in town Moss Rose grew in all the cracks in our sidewalk.

My youngest daughter brought her garden residue out to add to our cold composting pile. Ever since we've had moss rose pop up all around the gardens. It's so colorful & fun! You gotta love it.

Years ago Snow-on-the-Mountain became a part of life for me. My daughter & I bought a little house from my friend Cora Hol when she moved to a retirement home. Cora loved gardening. It was hard for her to give up her veggie garden & flower beds.

Exploring Cora's gardens was intriguing. Being an old farmer's wife Cora had her own gardening methods. It was here I got acquainted with what Cora called 'Snow-on-the-Mountain'. Hundreds of strange plants jumped up in sunny planting spaces. My daughter & I wondered if they were weeds. Plants that are that prolific could easy be weeds. Cora laughed when I asked about them. She said they self-seed everywhere & just pull 'em out where we didn't want them to grow.

Garden visitors always asked what is that plant? But no one believed it was Snow-on-the-Mountain because of the other foliage plant that goes by the same common name. So it was a mystery to solve.

Finally I found information on the plant in a book recommended during my Master Gardener course, "Weeds of Nebraska and the Great Plains" Published by Nebraska Dept. of Agriculture.

This is what I learned. It is called Snow-on-the-Mountain & is a close relative of poinsettia. It is usually considered poisonous but Mourning Doves eat the seeds without harm. The plant contains a milky juice that is caustic & can cause skin irritation. It's the showy bracts with white to pinkish margins that make the plant pretty. It is grown as an ornamental by some people like Cora & now me.

I share the seed with garden friends. A mutual friend of Cora & mine says, "Anyone who's ever known Cora has 'Snow-on-the-Mountain'.

www.lib.ksu.edu/wildflower/snow.html

My garden is never complete without Zinnias! I love Zinnias! The new profusion series Zinnias are wonderful. They're butterfly magnets exploding with bright colors in the sun garden. And they're so easy to grow.

I save zinnia seed. I love the little Thumbelina mini-zinnias. They're one of my favorite things. I pull off the seed heads after they are very dried on the plant. Some I scatter to the wind. Some I stick in a paper sack to wait for spring sowing. I just go out & throw them on the ground in spring after the soil has warmed. They crop up here & there in the sunny spots. Butterflies love them. Some times I buy zinnia seeds too cause I love them so much. I always have plenty to share with garden friends.

www.burpee.com

"Zinnias are easy to grow in well drained, rich loamy soil, in the open with full sun.

Light: Full sun for most cultivars. The pale green cultivar, 'Envy' tolerates light shade.

Moisture: Zinnias do best in well drained soil with infrequent watering. They are quite drought tolerant. Zinnias may become infected with powdery mildew in humid climates, especially if they don't have good air circulation all around them.

Hardiness: Zinnias are warm weather annuals. They do best in climates with long, hot, dry summers. Zinnias do not tolerate frost.

Propagation: Sow seeds where the plants are to be grown in spring after the last frost, or set out 6-8 week-old seedlings. Zinnias are sensitive to root disturbance, so be especially careful when transplanting."

History: Native to Mexico and Central America, the genus Zinnia was named after Johann Gottfried Zinn, an eighteenth-century German botanist / professor of medicine at Gottingen University. During the nineteenth century, European hybridizers worked on Zinnia elegans, a drab purplish wildflower, to develop brightly-colored double forms, such as dahlia-flowered zinnias. The W. Atlee Burpee Company picked up the torch during the 1920s and introduced large cactus-flowered zinnias (named for their resemblance to cactus-flowered dahlias, not to cacti).

www.floridata.com/ref/Z/zinn_ele.cfm

www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/firstgarden/planning/dictionary/flowers/zinnias.html

See more zinnias on the Autumn 2005 and Bed 13 pages.